NBC NEWS: The foreign national who was part of a group wearing wetsuits and fins and using self-propelled sea scooters to reach the shore by way of the Pacific Ocean, Sgt. David Ross, with the Imperial Beach Sheriff's Station, told NBC station KNSD.

Five or six men were first seen at about 6:30 a.m., Ross said. Shortly after that, Border Patrol agents took one of the men into custody and it was that man who said he and the drowning victim had tried to enter the country from Mexico.

The other men are believed to have either run off or swam back out to sea, said Ross.

Border Patrol Agent Steven Pitts told the San Diego Union Tribune that the Border Patrol and Coast Guard have stepped up patrols along the water to keep people from dying, he said.

"They were swimming in the ocean trying to make it to the beach," Pitts said. "This underscores the dangers of trying to cross through the ocean. It's so unpredictable."

The use of sea scooters, which can dive about 15 feet under water, was reported in early February as a novelty by Reuters and other news outlets. Two men, 38 and 16 years old, walking on a beach south of San Diego were wearing wet suits and holding their scooters when they were spotted by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection helicopter.

"These devices can be used to come north along the coastline and steer into shore ... where they can meet someone who will pick them up in a vehicle and further their entrance into the United States," said Michael Jiminez, a Border Patrol spokesperson.

At the time, he noted that once-rare attempts to cross the border by water had doubled each year since 2008 as land crossings became more difficult.

Several groups were recently arrested after traversing ocean waters in pangas, long fishing boats used in Mexico, the Union-Tribune and other news agencis reported.

On Wednesday, 19 men and a woman, ages 24 to 55, suspected of entering the country illegally by a panga boat, were taken into custody at South Carlsbad State Beach.

Eleven people trying to enter off the coast of San Onofre State Beach were arrested early Tuesday morning after Border Patrol agents spotted their panga-style boat near Camp Pendleton.

In November 2009, agents arrested 21 suspected illegal immigrants, all Mexican nationals, seen in a 15-foot panga when they came ashore on Beacon's Beach, near Encinitas. It was the third boat interception in a week.

A month earlier, a small fishing boat dropped off 20 illegal immigrants on South Ponto Beach in Carlsbad, officials said.

While the data herein is of interest, IMO the article misses the larger point about the issue's relation with the moves to create not only 10-20 million new overwhelmingly Democratic voters out of the illegals here, but the literally tens of millions more out of the family members that they would get to bring in. It also misses the point about what happens when, God willing, someday our economy improves. Furthermore while some of the anti-illegal folks are xenophobic, lots of us would LOVE to see easier entry for desirable folks with more rational procedures.=================

To listen to the recent Republican Presidential debates, you'd think illegal immigration was the biggest threat to the U.S. economy—not to mention to the rule of law, our social fabric and national security. We hate to spoil the political reverie, but the real immigration story these days is how many fewer illegal migrants are trying to get into the land of the free.

That's the news from the Department of Homeland Security, which reports that border apprehensions have dropped to their lowest level in nearly 40 years. For fiscal 2010, arrests were 463,000, down from 724,000 in 2008—a one-third decline in two years.

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Close..In the first 11 months of fiscal 2011, through August, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reports that apprehensions were 316,458, well below last year's level. As the nearby chart shows, as recently as 2006 more than one million illegals were arrested entering the country each year.

Some of the decline in illegal crossings is no doubt due to both the reality of, and the deterrence effect from, increased security at the Rio Grande Valley and other border areas. The number of agents has roughly doubled over the past decade, and the Border Patrol has improved its surveillance.

But surely the biggest factor is the poor U.S. economy. Immigrants of all types come to the U.S. primarily for jobs and opportunity. In the booming 1980s and 1990s, when the economy created more than 35 million net new jobs, border crossings were often three times higher than they are today. As growth has slowed and job openings are fewer, the attraction of the U.S. has dimmed.

Related Video Stuart Anderson, on why conservatives are opposing E-Verify...This may be cause for celebration in some places, but not in these columns. The fact that foreign workers, like overseas investment funds, aren't as attracted to the U.S. as they once were is another sign of economic malaise. According to the Census Bureau's historical data, the only time in U.S. history when more people left America than arrived was during the height of the Great Depression. This is not a period to emulate. We'd gladly take faster growth with more illegal immigration over slower growth and fewer illegals.

Despite these falling apprehension numbers, Republicans and their talk show minders are still shouting that the border isn't "secure." But by their definition the border will never be secure. This line has become the all-seasons excuse to block any immigration reform that would allow more legal avenues into the U.S. This campaign is already doing great harm to U.S. agriculture, as farmers are unable to find enough workers of any kind to harvest their crops. Yet Republicans are putting onerous restrictions on recruiting legal workers for those jobs. (See our editorial, "Republican Overregulation," Sept. 13.)

The declining border apprehensions show that economic opportunity, not a life on the dole, is the main motivation for immigrants who enter the U.S. with or without a visa. If there were more legal avenues, fewer migrants would have an incentive to enter illegally.

Immigrants bring vitality and skills to the U.S. economy, whether in the tech centers of Silicon Valley or the farmlands of the Midwest and Yuma Valley. We need more of both these days

There appears to be a complete surrender from Republican "elites" on isues of illegals as well as the gay fatada.

I can understand Anderson Cooper whipping up every school age gay bully incident into a national level tragedy but I don't know why the republicans have mea culpad (if you will pardon the grammer) on these issues.

Like Mark Levin noted Perry is like the Bushes on illegals. They sound like they are looking the other way completely and pursuing policies that simply encourage more to come and take advantage of our society.

As well articulated by Jude Wanniski in his "The Way the World Works", leaders are those who best discern the zeitgeist (am I using this word properly) of what "the people" want, as inchoate as it may be; (successful entrepeneurs too.)

State more simply, politicians are for sale to the biggest number of voters.

The IQ around here is such that I don't need to spell out the demographics of the American population and the trends over time built into it.

If Reps lose the latino vote (of which a very large percentage is Mexican American) over time the Republican Party will become nationally what it already is in the northeast-- a sure loser. Look at what happened to the Republican Party in California after Gov. Pete Wilson and the Reps succeeded in passing the , , , what was it , , , the no bi-lingual education initiative , , , or was it no welfare for illegals? Anyway, it passed, the Fed courts threw it out and the Latino vote decided the Reps were anti-Latino. Time went on, the demographic trends asserted themselves, and now the Reps near extinction in California.

The majority of us around here may desire a hard line on illegals, but I'm not sure we yet have a good practical strategy.

It is probably safe to bet that the tradition of heated arguments over immigration began millennia ago, when the first country drew a line in the sand. But the past week in the United States of America has been a hot one, at least by any recent comparison.

You might say it began on Tuesday night, like many a bloody fight, in Vegas, when this exchange took place at the Republican debate:

Rather unpleasant, no?

Or it could have been said to begin back on Saturday, when Herman Cain, at a Tea Party sponsored event in Tennessee, proposed an electrified fence — not the joy buzzer type but the type that kills those who dare to breach it — on the U.S.-Mexico border. Or even earlier on Saturday, when Michele Bachmann, campaigning in Iowa proposed her own “secure double fence” for the border. (Bachmann, who seems to always have a pen handy, signed a pledge with the group Americans for Securing the Border, affirming her commitment to the fence.)

Midweek, The Times’s Trip Gabriel reported on the potential fallout for the G.O.P. of this kind of tough talk: the alienation of droves of Latino voters in battleground states in 2012.

And one might even suppose it culminated in an immigration fight of a different sort —the late-week dust-up that began when a story in The Washington Post asserted that the U.S. senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, “embellished” the story of his parents arrival in the United States from Cuba, for his political advantage. Many — including The Miami Herald and Rubio himself — responded with outrage at the story, and called the motives of the paper into question. Rubio’s stature as a popular Latino Republican, one who has been mentioned as a vice-presidential candidate, has led some to assert that the story itself was a “hit job.”

And lest anyone think the issue breaks clearly down partisan lines, there was this, as reported by The Hill: “The U.S. deported more people — nearly 400,000 — who were in the country illegally in fiscal 2011 than ever before, according to the latest numbers released Tuesday by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureau.

“President Obama’s administration touted the startling figures as evidence of its progress in stopping illegal immigration, a record that could help the president win back independent voters who abandoned Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections.”

Despite all the hot collars and flaring tempers brought on by the Republican antics, it was this last point, a revealing bit of information on the Obama administration’s position on the matter, which opened a round of soul-searching among some bloggers on the left. How tough should Democrats be on immigration and border security?

Soon after the debate, Joe Klein at Swampland pointed out.

It should also be noted that all this macho posturing about electrified fences, crocodiles etc. avoids the most basic fact about illegal immigration — it is down dramatically. The bad economy means there are fewer jobs to lure illegals. The efforts of the last several Presidents [have] significantly beefed up Border Patrol, fencing and high-tech surveillance. And the Obama Administration has been very tough on illegals–almost 400,000, a record, have been deported in the past year. (Of course, you won’t hear the Obama Administration touting this since it might turn away Latino votes…the President, like a strict Franciscan Friar, does not tout his good works, like tax cuts and tightening the border. Weird.)

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones replied to Klein’s post:

I don’t really have a big problem with beefing up the border patrol, but the real answer to illegal immigration (in the short term, anyway) is to lower the cost of legal immigration by boosting quota levels and to raise the cost of illegal immigration by making it unprofitable for employers to hire undocumented workers. That means getting E-verify to work and then tightening up the enforcement and penalties on employers who cheat. It will be interesting to see if the American public actually supports this once they see the results (no more cheap gardeners, no more cheap vegetables, etc.), but the basic idea is hardly impossible to implement.

So far, so good. Then Ryan Bonneville at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen threw a wet blanket on the border patrol bandwagon:

As has been widely reported for several days now, Obama set a new deportation record in the last fiscal year (narrowly edging out the previous record, which also belonged to his administration). This is, no doubt, the latest in his myriad attempts to co-opt the right and burnish his bipartisan credentials heading into the upcoming election. …

Any time he moves to the right, they are going to move further to the right, and their base is going to move with them. There is nothing Obama can do to alter the political calculus here.

But Bonneville truly sounded a note of despair about Klein, Drum and what he calls the “feckless discourse” of Obama and his base on immigration:

Obama’s base is as feckless as he is, which is why he expresses no compunctions about the policy choices he makes. What do you say to Joe Klein when he claims that the “most basic fact” about illegal immigration is that it’s “down”? That the real reason we don’t need crocodiles patrolling the border has nothing at all to do with the number of people illegally crossing it? Drum isn’t much better when his response is “I don’t really have a big problem with beefing up the border patrol”. Why not, Kevin? …

Instead of the fine, self-righteous rage I was working up about what a failure Obama’s presidency has been, I’m left mostly with disappointment. I don’t want to imply that there aren’t any voices doing great work on this ([Adam] Serwer is one of them, most of the time), but more and more it’s becoming clear that Obama is right about what liberals want, and I’m wrong. That’s not infuriating; it’s crushing.

(For those who are riveted by this, Drum defends his stance in a response post, which in turn elicited a response from Matt Yglesias.)

But still the fireworks were being generated by Republicans. On Thursday, Steven Benen at Political Animal expanded on the Times analysis of the Latino voter fallout:

A few weeks ago, Mitt Romney’s campaign launched an attack ad, going after Rick Perry for a Texas policy that offers in-state tuition to children of undocumented immigrants. It was an ugly, borderline-racist commercial, intended to exploit right-wing animus towards Latino immigrants. I noted at the time that Romney appears to be hoping that these voters have short memories and will forget about his divisive antics by Election Day 2012.

Of course, the larger issue goes well beyond one obnoxious ad. Given the extent to which Republican presidential hopefuls are appealing to anti-immigrant voters, the Latino community isn’t exactly being made to feel welcome in the GOP.

But it’s clear Latino voters may not just run up against that problem with Republicans. Adam Serwer, who Bonneville praises, had this to say even before Tuesday’s debate, on the cognitive dissonance of the administration’s stance on “immigration removal:”

In the twisted bizarro world of Washington politics, media conventions have obliged journalists to report with equal “balance” the Republican claim that Obama is pursuing a policy of “backdoor amnesty” even as he racks up more deportations than any president ever before. You’ll hear something similar at the GOP debate tonight if the Republican candidates are asked what needs to be done about illegal immigrations. Perhaps the other candidates will compete with Herman Cain at imagining the most elaborate possible death trap that could be placed at the border to deter would-be migrants.

What you won’t hear about, however, is the human cost to the families, citizen and non-citizen, impacted by the sheer volume and efficiency of the Obama administraton’s immigration removal policy. Neither side is particularly interested in talking about that — Republicans because compassion for the undocumented is political suicide, and the administration because it’s attempting a delicate balancing act between strict immigration enforcement policies and maintaining the approval of Latino voters who were hoping for more out of the Obama administration than record deportation numbers.

"“President Obama’s administration touted the startling figures as evidence of its progress in stopping illegal immigration, a record that could help the president win back independent voters who abandoned Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections.”

Sad to say I for one do not trust any statistics that come from our government.

Remember I noted a patient a while back who I advised might have too much wear and tear to be doing the heavy work he does so he promptly took that as a signal to go and apply for total permanent disability and to my amazement he got it in a few weeks. The guy is in late 50s.

I have since seen him back and he looked pretty good. He told me retirement is going well and he is exercising everyday doing long walks and machines. This from a guy who is on Federal disability because he has too much arthritis.

That said it occured to me the gov may very well be granting disability to a wider group of people because that keeps them from being on the unemployment rolls. Thus the unemployment figures are lower.

What does it say about our government when it is obvious we cannot trust their own statistics as not being truthful and manipulated for political gain?

I think Michelle Bachman is over her head but I am respecting her steadfastness more and more. If only there were more, a lot more like her!

Romney seems to me just too much of the same establishment guy. Surely that is why he still cannot pull away from the pack in the polls.

I guess the counter argument is that he might be better to attract the middle of the roaders but I agree overall with those who correctly point out compromise is what has gotten us here to start with.

By NAFTALI BENDAVID and ARIAN CAMPO-FLORES Many Republicans see Marco Rubio as a rising star who can help them win over the fast-growing Hispanic population, but the Florida senator says toned-down rhetoric on the hot-button issue of immigration would be more likely to bring those voters to the GOP.

Many in the GOP think Florida Sen. Marco Rubio can help the party appeal to swing-state Hispanic voters—possibly as vice-presidential nominee.

"The policies are important, but the rhetoric is sometimes the impediment," Mr. Rubio said in an interview. "Sometimes—and I'm not pointing fingers at anyone—the way the message is communicated is harmful and has hurt Republicans."

Mr. Rubio, 40 years old, is viewed by some Republicans as almost a savior when it comes to winning over Hispanics. Whether as the party's vice-presidential nominee—potentially tipping key swing states into the GOP column—or simply a fresh new voice, Republican leaders say, he can persuade Hispanics to take a second look at the party.

"I don't think any individual can do that," said Mr. Rubio.

Mr. Rubio has established himself as a foreign-policy hawk, advocating a muscular role for the U.S. abroad and criticizing President Barack Obama for what he views as a hesitancy on Iran. He is also a fiscal conservative who shares the small-government, anti-tax views of many in the tea-party movement. He has opposed some of this year's bipartisan spending deals, saying they didn't cut enough.

Just as his political portfolio includes issues far beyond immigration, Mr. Rubio says the concerns of Hispanic voters cover the spectrum—not just immigration.

"They have the same concerns as the rest of the country, and in many respects heightened concerns," he said, citing unemployment and the weak economy.

Republicans have long argued their party should be a natural home for Latinos. "A lot of Hispanics are social conservatives," said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah). "They are pro-life, they are religious, they believe in work. Marco can really help us connect with them because he is the son of immigrants."

But the GOP emphasis on border enforcement and opposition to a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants is alienating many Hispanic voters, polls suggest. Democrats won 66% of the Hispanic vote in the 2008 presidential election and 60% in last year's congressional elections, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Mr. Rubio generally embraces his party's immigration policies.

The buzz around Mr. Rubio has only intensified in recent days. Straw polls and interviews suggest he's easily Republicans' leading choice for vice president. Some Republicans believe Mr. Rubio fits the GOP's needs of the moment. Democrats are skeptical of Mr. Rubio's national appeal.

"You have all these Republican candidates during the debates tripping over each other to see who can be more…anti-immigration," said Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D., Ill.). "So they…pick Marco Rubio, and they think that will be enticing to Latinos?"

Mr. Rubio rules out joining the ticket, saying he has only been in the Senate 10 months. "I take it as a compliment, but I have a job, and it's an important job," he said.

Mr. Rubio's engagement in two recent high-profile spats highlighted the problems he could face in appealing to Latinos nationally. He locked horns with Univision, the nation's largest Spanish-language network, over a segment on his brother-in-law's drug conviction.

Then last week, the senator sparred with news organizations over reports suggesting Mr. Rubio had embellished the story of his family's emigration from Cuba. The accounts suggested his parents fled for economic opportunity more than to escape political persecution, triggering a debate over whether his family could be considered typical of the community of Cuban-American political exiles.

Mr. Rubio said he'd like the GOP to discuss immigration in a different way.

Excerpts 'I really try not to ride the highs or the lows.' —Read more from the interview. ."The Republican Party needs to be the pro-legal immigration party," said Mr. Rubio. "We need to say, 'We believe in immigration and we think it's good for America.' But it has to be orderly, a system based on law, a system that works." He notes that people in Florida welcome Canadians who winter in their state and that farmers need agricultural workers.

But his positions on immigration policies may be a hindrance. He opposes a path to citizenship for illegal aliens and opposes the Dream Act, which would provide a chance for some undocumented youth to become legal.

Lionel Sosa, an adviser to Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign who's long been involved with GOP Hispanic politics, said Mr. Rubio "will have to moderate his positions" on immigration if he is to attract a large numbers of Hispanics.

Mr. Rubio faces another delicate issue—he's from the Cuban-American community, which is more conservative than other Latino groups and has benefited from immigration policies that afford its members a quick path to legalization.

Latino Decisions, a nonpartisan firm that polls the Hispanic community, found that Mr. Rubio garnered 78% of Cuban-American support when he ran for Senate but only 40% of the non-Cuban Hispanic vote, though that is still a relatively high number for a Republican. Such numbers worry many GOP strategists, because Hispanics play important roles in swing states such as Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada.

"Republicans are in definite need of doing better with Hispanic voters around the country," said GOP consultant Whit Ayres.

This concern dovetails with Mr. Rubio's growing national profile. He has been delivering speeches around the U.S. and using a perch on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to speak out on foreign affairs. He has created a political action committee to support conservatives, and he plans a memoir.

Interesting that Rubio is against the pathway or whatever amnesty is now called. I agree with his point that at the very least politically, Republicans must be pro-legal-immigration in a lawful and orderly way. If done right this makes good economic sense too and follows in a great tradition that got most of the rest of us here.

Woof, Let's see if the State's are at the mercy of the distant, inept, and corrupt Federal government (exactly why the Revolutionary war was fought). The headline comes at the end: Kagan recluses herself!!!!

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court stepped into the fight Monday over a tough Arizona law that requires local police to help enforce federal immigration laws — pushing the court deeper into hot, partisan issues of the 2012 election campaign.The court's election-year docket now contains three politically charged disputes, including President Barack Obama's health care overhaul and Texas redistricting.The debate over immigration already is shaping presidential politics, and now the court is undertaking a review of an Arizona law that has spawned a host of copycat state laws targeting illegal immigrants.The court will review a federal appeals court ruling that blocked several provisions in the Arizona law. One of those requires that police, while enforcing other laws, question a person's immigration status if officers suspect he is in the country illegally.The case is the court's biggest foray into immigration law in decades, said Temple University law professor Peter Spiro, an expert in that area.The Obama administration challenged the Arizona law by arguing that regulating immigration is the job of the federal government, not states. Similar laws in Alabama, South Carolina and Utah also are facing administration lawsuits. Private groups are suing over immigration measures adopted in Georgia and Indiana."This case is not just about Arizona. It's about every state grappling with the costs of illegal immigration," Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, said following the court's announcement Monday.Fifty-nine Republicans in Congress, including presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, filed a brief with the court backing the Arizona law.The immigration case, like the challenge to Obama's health care overhaul, pits Republican-led states against the Democratic administration in an argument about the reach of federal power. The redistricting case has a similarly partisan tinge to it, with Republicans who control the state government in Texas facing off against Democrats and minority groups that tend vote Democratic.In the immigration arena, the states say that the federal government isn't doing enough to address a major problem and that border states are suffering disproportionately.The issue has been widely discussed by the Republican candidates for president. They have mostly embraced a hard line to avoid accusations that they support any kind of "amnesty" for the some 12 million illegal immigrants estimated to be living in the U.S.Newt Gingrich was most recently criticized by his opponents for saying he would grant legal status to some with longstanding family and community ties, and Gingrich has since endorsed the South Carolina law that allows police to demand a person's immigration status. That law is among the four state laws that have been challenged by the administration.Brewer signed the Arizona immigration measure into law in April 2010. The administration sued three months later to block it from taking effect.In April, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a federal judge's ruling halting enforcement of several provisions of the law. Among the blocked provisions: requiring all immigrants to obtain or carry immigration registration papers; making it a state criminal offense for an illegal immigrant to seek work or hold a job and allowing police to arrest suspected illegal immigrants without warrants.In October, the federal appeals court in Atlanta blocked parts of the Alabama law that forced public schools to check the immigration status of students and allowed police to file criminal charges against people who were unable to prove their citizenship.Lawsuits in South Carolina and Utah are not as far along.The administration argued that the justices should have waited to see how other courts ruled on the challenges to other laws before getting involved. Still, following the court's announcement Monday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, "We look forward to arguing our point of view in that case when the time comes."Spiro, the Temple University immigration expert, said the court easily could have passed on the Arizona case for now. "They could have waited for the more extreme case to come from Alabama, which really outflanked the Arizona law," Spiro said.He predicted the court would uphold the police check of immigration status but perhaps not the measure making it a crime to be without immigration documents.Arguments probably will take place in late April, which would give the court roughly two months to decide the caseJustice Elena Kagan will not take part case, presumably because of her work on the issue when she served in the Justice Department in the Obama administration.The case is Arizona v. U.S., 11-182.

By ROBERT GUEST I once asked the boss of Tata Consulting Services, a gigantic Indian IT firm, how many of his top executives had worked or studied abroad. He replied: "All of them."

The world's most talented people are exceptionally mobile. When they move to America, they make it smarter, and that's not just because they are smart. It is also because migration creates connections.

A couple of generations ago, immigrants might sail to America and never see their old friends again. Today, they can text their brothers, wire money to their business partners, and fly back home regularly.

So they form networks. Brainy Indians in Silicon Valley natter constantly with brainy Indians in Bangalore. Brainy Chinese and Peruvians do likewise. Diaspora networks speed the flow of ideas across borders. And this has far-reaching consequences.

It turbocharges trade. Immigrants often start companies that are multinational from day one. Consider the story of Mei Xu. She was born in China during the Cultural Revolution. Her childhood memories are of being locked in a small room while her parents were harangued by a Maoist mob for being "bourgeois."

Now she lives in suburban Maryland and runs an ocean-straddling business. It started when she spotted a gap in the American market for fancy candles. She designed them herself and persuaded her sister in China to set up a factory to make them. Now her firm, Pacific Trade International, grosses $100 million a year.

Her success depends on having a foot in both countries. She understands American tastes. And she has contacts in China, without which she would struggle to get anything done.

Contacts are crucial in emerging markets, because the rule of law is typically weak. If you can't rely on the courts to enforce contracts, you need to know whom you can trust. William Kerr of Harvard Business School has shown that American firms that hire immigrants find it easier to do business with those immigrants' countries of origin.

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CloseGetty Images .This matters for the United States: Most of the growth in the global economy is in emerging markets. And the diaspora effect is very large. For example, an estimated 70% of the world's foreign direct investment in China passes through ethnic Chinese who live outside mainland China.

Migrant networks accelerate the spread of technology, too. Immigrant researchers in America constantly bounce ideas off their chums back home. As these ideas bounce back and forth, they evolve.

For example, three Indian-American engineers had the idea of adapting the cooling technology from a computer to cool a refrigerator. Through a personal introduction, their firm in Texas, Sheetak Inc., linked up with Godrej & Boyce, an appliance manufacturer in Mumbai. Together, they developed a fridge that costs only $70.

Indian and Chinese consumers demand ultra-cheap products. Local engineers strain every brain cell to invent such "frugal" products, which are often an order of magnitude cheaper than their Western equivalents. We're talking about $300 prefabricated houses and $1,800 heart operations.

If America wants to tap the gusher of innovation that is starting to come out of emerging markets, it has to keep letting in immigrants from those places. Some will stay; others will eventually go home. Either way, they will keep ideas flowing through America. A study by the Kauffman Foundation found that two-thirds of Indian entrepreneurs who move back to India from America maintain at least monthly contact with their former colleagues in the U.S. Chinese returnees are nearly as chatty.

Immigrants also provide America with an army of unofficial diplomats, recruiters and deal-brokers. When they visit the countries where they were born, they may grumble about American foreign policy. But they also talk about their well-paid jobs, their amiable neighbors, and the vibrancy of American churches.

And immigrants often absorb and spread American ideals. The opening of the Indian economy in 1991 was partly inspired by the success of Indians living abroad. (During the closed era, a lawmaker cheekily asked Indira Gandhi: "Can the prime minister explain why Indians seem to thrive economically under every government in the world except her own?")

Today, students from China who come to America cannot help noticing that the air is cleaner, the people are richer, and the political system allows people to choose a new government without bloodshed.

Hundreds of thousands of foreign-educated Chinese, known as "sea turtles," have moved back to China in the past decade. They are the elite—bright enough to win scholarships or rich enough to pay American college fees. Many are now highly influential. They dominate the Chinese technology industry, Chinese universities and the think tanks that advise the government in Beijing. They are also steadily rising within the Communist Party.

Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution calculates that sea turtles were 6% of the Communist Party's central committee in 2002. When the next generation of leaders takes over in 2012, he expects, they will be 15%-17%. Few sea turtles return home loudly proclaiming the merits of democracy—that would be career suicide. But China's eventual transition to one-person, one-vote will surely come sooner, and more smoothly, because such a high proportion of the Chinese elite have seen firsthand how free societies work.

While skilled immigrants make America smarter, richer and more influential, the process for obtaining a work visa is dismayingly slow, capricious and humiliating. The political debate in the United States about immigration focuses almost entirely on keeping unskilled Mexicans out, which is odd, since they stopped coming in large numbers when the construction industry crashed in 2008.

Skilled migrants have choices. Canada, Australia and New Zealand welcome them. America, by contrast, lets them come to study and then throws them out when they graduate. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg calls this "national suicide." He is right. For America to shut out immigrants is like Saudi Arabia setting fire to its oil wells.

Mr. Guest is business editor at the Economist. His new book is "Borderless Economics: Chinese Sea Turtles, Indian Fridges and the New Fruits of Global Capitalism" (Palgrave Macmillan).

Hundreds of thousands of foreign-educated Chinese, known as "sea turtles," have moved back to China in the past decade. They are the elite—bright enough to win scholarships or rich enough to pay American college fees. Many are now highly influential. They dominate the Chinese technology industry, Chinese universities and the think tanks that advise the government in Beijing. They are also steadily rising within the Communist Party.

Is this a explanation for why Wukan hasn't been leveled? Although I think they aren't out of the woods yet.....

WASHINGTON — The federal agency in charge of deportations is conducting a far-reaching training course to push immigration enforcement officers and prosecutors nationwide to focus their efforts on removing immigrants convicted of crimes. The training course is the clearest sign yet that administration officials want to transform the way immigration officers work, asking them to make nuanced decisions to speed deportations of high-risk offenders while halting those of illegal immigrants with clean records and strong ties to the country. The policy is President Obama’s most ambitious immigration initiative before the November elections, senior administration officials said. But in a new sign of the deep dissension over immigration, the union representing some 7,000 deportation officers of the agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, has so far not allowed its members to participate in the training. Without the formal assent of the union, the administration’s strategy could be significantly slowed for months in labor negotiations. Chris Crane, the president of the union, the National ICE Council, has fiercely criticized the strategy, saying it amounts to orders from ICE officials for agents not to enforce the law. In Congressional testimony, Mr. Crane accused the administration of tailoring its enforcement practices to win support from immigrant communities for Mr. Obama’s re-election. “Law enforcement and public safety have taken a back seat to attempts to satisfy immigrant advocacy groups,” Mr. Crane told a House Judiciary subcommittee in October. Department of Homeland Security officials say the training seminar, although only half a day, is central to bringing all ICE officers on board for an effort that they say will significantly raise the numbers of convicted criminals among deportees and is expected to lead in coming months to unprecedented suspensions of deportations of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants. Virtually all ICE commanding officers and prosecutors have gone through the training course and are working on the new strategy, Homeland Security Department officials said. But because of the silence from the ICE Council, a local of the American Federation of Government Employees, the officials will miss their Jan. 13 goal for completing the nationwide training blitz, which began in November. Mr. Crane has channeled his criticisms primarily through Republican leaders in Congress, working with Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Calling the administration’s plan “backdoor amnesty,” Mr. Smith said last week that evidence Mr. Crane presented to the committee showed that directives from ICE officials for agents to use discretion in enforcement decisions had “undermined the agency’s credibility and mission.” The National ICE Council faces a deadline late this month to say whether it will demand negotiations over the training, the officials said. Mr. Crane did not respond to repeated e-mail requests over several months for comment. On another side, the administration is facing intense pressure from Latino leaders and immigrant organizations to begin halting deportations. The cornerstone of the policy is a June 17 memorandum by John Morton, the director of ICE, in which he laid out a list of no fewer than 31 factors that ICE officers should weigh when deciding whether to proceed with a deportation. Peter S. Vincent, ICE’s top lawyer, added further guidelines on Nov. 17. With slide shows and chalk talks on a dozen hypothetical immigration cases, the training seminar challenges officers to decide which foreigners should be deported, using prosecutorial discretion to make more complex decisions than they have in decades. It instructs agents to focus on the worst offenders, including criminal convicts, gang members and foreigners who came back after being expelled. Other groups of immigrants — elderly people, children, military veterans, college students and parents of young citizens — are low priorities who can be allowed to stay, even if they are here illegally. A New York Times reporter sat through an abbreviated version of the seminar.

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Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the policy was based on existing statutes and was intended to make good use of strained resources. With each deportation costing at least $23,000, she said, immigration agencies have money for 400,000 removals each year, a goal that the Obama administration has met in each of the past three years. But an estimated 11 million immigrants live here illegally. The training asks ICE agents what they should do, for example, with a young illegal immigrant turned over to the agency after being arrested by a state trooper for driving without a license. She has been living in this country since 1993 and has an infant son, an American citizen because he was born here. But she lied to ICE officers, failing to tell them she had a conviction for shoplifting in 1995. Answer: She is not a threatening criminal and may still be nursing her American baby. Officers should close her deportation case. How about the migrant who has been living here since he crossed the Southwest border illegally in 1996? He failed to appear for a crucial immigration court hearing back then. But he has no criminal record, and he coaches soccer at the school where his twin daughters, both citizens, are enrolled. Answer: This case, too, should be closed. Then there is the man from an Asian Pacific island, a legal resident of the United States since 1984 who even served two distinguished combat tours in Iraq. But he left the military and is now finishing a six-year prison sentence for a federal sex-trafficking felony. Answer: Despite his service, because of his grave sex offense he loses his resident status and will be sent by ICE to his birth country. Cases against illegal immigrants who win favorable prosecutorial discretion will be closed but not canceled, so ICE can easily reopen them. Mr. Morton said the immigrants would remain in “legal limbo,” not gaining any legal immigration status. Mr. Crane told Congress that the Morton directives presented enforcement agents with “a roller coaster of arrest authority that has changed from month to month, week to week and at times from day to day.” He said some agents were afraid to make any arrests. It is not clear how deeply the union’s resistance reaches into ICE ranks. ICE officials say many field agents have been drawn to the professional appeal of the high-profile anticrime operations against foreign street gangs, drug dealers and sex offenders that the agency is conducting ever more frequently. “Our folks understand that we have limited resources and we have to focus more than ever on our priorities,” said Chris Shanahan, the ICE field office director who oversees deportation operations in New York City, where all supervisors have had the training. “What I see from my officers,” Mr. Shanahan said, “is that they understand that criminal aliens and national security threats should be taken into custody and removed before a single mother, a pregnant woman or someone with small United States citizen children.”

[From Pres.2012] "Contrary to his own previous statements on the subject, with his Executive Order BO today blew off his responsibilities under our Constitution to enforce the immigration laws. ... "

Note that this topic went dormant since Jan. Illegal immigration is down because of the bad economy. People instead are going home. Still it needs to be solved - and mass deportation of otherwise law abiding citizens is mostly not going to happen.

Reactions to Obama's move:

1) Already mentioned, it is abuse of power and a shirk of his constitutional responsibilities.

2) It is an Obama flip flop. He already said it would be inappropriate for the executive branch to act unilaterally. They had already done everything they could legally do. Must see video link below.

3) Picking off the low hanging fruit first undermines a larger idea of acting comprehensively.

4) Roughly 100% of the voters are going to see this as a cynical political ploy to win votes though many with a direct family, neighbor or friend stake in it will see that as worth it. The Hispanic vote was only 9% of the total 2008 vote and Obama won 67% of them. Hispanics make a crucial difference in certain swing states. Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona come to mind.

5) Conservatives and people who respect our laws may have to in the end make concessions on some existing illegal immigrants. If the end game is concessions, too bad to look like the enemy of Hispanics during the negotiations. Romney and Rubio are mindful of this. They need to win the election to have any power over this or anything else going forward. But out of that caving and compromise should have come permanent border security, for one thing.

6) Romney risks perception of flip-flop-flip with his next move as he went pretty hardline on illegals during the chase for the Republican nomination.

7) There are other areas of political/economic opportunity: expanding LEGAL immigration of scientists, engineers and business owners from around the world where Republicans still can lead.--------------Krauthammer, out and out lawlessness: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/06/15/krauthammer_obamas_immigration_policy_is_out-and-out_lawlessness.html

It was a stupid move by Mitt (during the FL debate IIRC) when he jumped on Newt for Newt's early forerunner version of this.

As to reasons for declining illegal immigration I would add

a) the official unemployment rate (yeah, yeah, I know) in Mexico is something like 5 or 6 %b) the narco gangs scoop up large numbers of mojados as they approach the border to steal their money, to rape the women, to forcibly recruit the men as mules and hit men, and so forth. Mass graves (we're talking 40-60 at a time here being typical numbers) are common.

4) Roughly 100% of the voters are going to see this as a cynical political ploy to win votes though many with a direct family, neighbor or friend stake in it will see that as worth it. The Hispanic vote was only 9% of the total 2008 vote and Obama won 67% of them. Hispanics make a crucial difference in certain swing states. Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona come to mind."

Most Americans support this kind of program. Hispanics OVERWHELMINGLY support this kind of action. As pointed out by Doug, that's important in "crucial swing states". What do the Republicans suggest? Rounding them all up after they finish school and sending them back to Mexico? I think it's a realistic program that most Americans will support and it will win Hispanic votes in key states. Smart move by Obama.

As a side note, although the subject is avoided, it is also a road to citizenship. Once you have a Green Card, citizenship is not that hard to obtain. Further, once you are a citizen, you can sponsor other relatives....

C'mon JDN, as already noted in this thread Marco Rubio was at work on this with both sides of the aisle-- which is probably why Baraq decided to blow off his previous concerns that he was not allowed to do what has he done here-- blow off his responsibility to enforce our laws. Apparently this seems to be of little interest to you.

George W Bush, McCain, Jeb Bush and other Republicans, Lugar I'm sure, favor some form of amnesty without using the a-word that polls so terribly. Reagan signed a deal with the devil Nov 6 1986 trading some form of amnesty for border security later that never happened.

Crafty mentions unemployment of our youth, but the ease of gang and terrorist mobility is reason enough to ask the federal government to do their job.

Democrats want no ID check coming in, no ID check for voting and then the power to pass laws that apply to other people and not to yourself, like raising tax rates on only the wealthiest Americans.

Maybe after we remove the meaning of the word marriage from the dictionary we can get rid of the concept of sovereignty too. All true libs want is one world government anyway.-------Text of Pres. Obama from one year ago. Read carefully. Was he lying to us then or is he lying to us now?

With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed — and I know that everybody here at Bell is studying hard so you know that we’ve got three branches of government. Congress passes the law. The executive branch’s job is to enforce and implement those laws. And then the judiciary has to interpret the laws.

There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as President.

Both. It doesn't seem to matter thought. The deciders of elections, the "undecideds" don't seem to think honesty is important enough a requisite job qualification. Clinton certainly proved that case in the 90's.

C'mon JDN, as already noted in this thread Marco Rubio was at work on this with both sides of the aisle-- which is probably why Baraq decided to blow off his previous concerns that he was not allowed to do what has he done here-- blow off his responsibility to enforce our laws. Apparently this seems to be of little interest to you.

Perhaps Rubio was working on this; an uphill battle in the Republican party. Romney sure isn't in favor of anything close to what Obama has done. Nor is Santorum.

And he didn't blow of his responsibility to enforce our laws; or are you saying that the President should "enforce our laws" and round op 12 million illegal immigrants and deport them all?That's ridiculous.

Obama gave the best and brightest a possible future here.

Good move by Obama. Romney seems rather speechless in his response so far. When asked if he will repeal Obama's order if elected, Romney jumped into the bus with no further questions being allowed.

Lalalala, it is all so simple, but absolutely no comment on the fact that Obama 2011 and half of 2012 disagrees with Obama's June 2012 campaign decision. If it is all so simple, so right, so obvious, why didn't he issue the executive order sooner? Why did he make the 2011 statement?

Doug, rather than finding a practical solution, the Republicans in the last year and a half have been moving to the right of this issue. The best they can do is say, "we should enforce the law". What does that mean? As I said, does that mean "round up 12 million illegal immigrants and deport them all." Republicans offer no solution.

That is ridiculous.

Obama, the American people have been waiting for some movement. In the interim, Obama has reduced immigration at the border. Obama has been enforcing the law vigorously deporting criminals. So now he has decided not to focus on a small group, i.e. students; he did not include millions upon millions who hope not to be deported. Like the cop on the street, given limited money and allocation of time, he can decide how to enforce the law. Where to set priorities. It's been done before.

Romney if elected can repeal that executive order the first day. Whoops Romney is awful quiet on that subject when asked it that is what he will do?

If you want to see a professional flip flopper, look at what Romney says on various issues.

Sometimes I am left wondering at how little you can replicate the other POV.

"Enforce the law" means , , , "Enforce the Law". It does not mean saying that one WILL NOT enforce certain parts of the law-- WHICH HAS BEEN NOTED WITH SPECIFICITY IN THIS THREAD PRESIDENT OBAMA HIMSELF HAS SAID HE CANNOT DO on various occassions. Setting enforcement priorities is fine, but saying that one WILL NOT enforce certain parts of the law is not. What is so hard to grasp about this distinction?

"As I said, does that mean "round up 12 million illegal immigrants and deport them all." Republicans offer no solution."

PLEASE.

I would say that for most Reps (i.e. excluding Ron Paul) the solution is clear. Enforce the law. CONTROL THE BORDER and then and only then COMPREHENSIVE reform. The shape of that reform matters. As best as I can tell for the Dems it means "Let in as many latinos as possible and define things so they can bring as many of their family members as possible because they will vote Dem."

If we were to grant the 11 million here amnesty and allow them to lever in their family members as envisioned by various proffered Dem plans, it would mean some 30-50 million new American citizens from Latin America. In that we already have serious balkanization and even secessionist tendencies already, this seems to me a REALLY bad idea. It seem to me that the Dems could give a flying fk because for them it is only a matter of expanding a class of people likely to vote for them regardless of the danger to the social fabric of the country.

Comprehensive reform IMHO shoulda) make it easier for seasonal farm labor;b) make it easier for high IQ, educated skilled people to get work visas, including with a path to citizenship.

But CONTROL OF THE BORDER must come first, lest there be a repeat of what happened with the Reagan amnesty. Yes Baraq can show some decent numbers about expelling criminal elements amongst the illegals (who by definition are criminal I know, but I think my point is understood anyway)-- but this also has included a big wink at the rest of the illegals.

With some frustration at having to repeat myself, much of the decline of border traffic comes not from truly controlling the border (witness the many expressions of the narco wars coming onto our side) but from our economy being stagnant, the Mexican economy doing rather well, and narco gangs preying upon those headed for the US in terrible ways.

The question to me was not the Obama flip flop; that is most obvious. The qestion was the legal merit and substance of what he said previously. He presents himself to be a constitutional scholar. So was he right that he cannot act unilaterally or was be wrong?

Actually, if we "enforced the law" all 12 million illegal immigrants would be arrested and returned to their country of origin. "Enforce the Law" doesn't only mean tighten the border, although from all accounts Obama has done that. Illegal immigration across the border is down albeit for various reasons but including increased enforcement.

Law enforcement on all levels selectively enforces the law. As for precedent, Bush did something very similar.

Even as you point out, why not let educated illegals and/or ones who have served in our military have a path citizenship?

It was a brilliant move by Obama. If the Republicans don't like it; repeal it if Romney is elected. But Romney doesn't know how to react. Negative reaction is just sour grapes; Republicans don't have a good answer.

1) "Enforce the law" does not mean all 12 million would be arrested and returned. It means that those caught would be treated according to the law. This is not hard to understand. (BTW as best as I can tell, the Bush reference article you cite is not precise enough to make clear the legal context).

2) "Even as you point out, why not let educated illegals and/or ones who have served in our military have a path citizenship?"

That simply is not what I said. I said this:

"Comprehensive reform IMHO shoulda) make it easier for seasonal farm labor;b) make it easier for high IQ, educated skilled people to get work visas, including with a path to citizenship."

There is NOTHING in there about giving illegals any kind of a leg up to citizenship.

As for "brilliant" move, perhaps , , , if one does not give a fk about the very same Constitutional issues cited by Baraq himself not so long ago , , ,

"Romney doesn’t want to come out against leniency for those brought here illegally when they were under 16, who have since graduated high school or served in the military and are now under 30. He is trailing by as much as 3 to 1 among Hispanic voters. He got himself in a box during the Republican primaries by taking a hard line on illegal immigrants, calling on them to “self-deport” and vowing to veto the DREAM Act, among other things. He wants to edge back toward the center, but Obama has just blocked the easiest path, which would be wrapping himself around whatever Rubio proposes.

I thought the president’s move—an obvious election-year gambit--would spark an explosion on the Republican right. But the reaction has been muted, even on Fox News. That tells me that in purely political terms, Obama has outmaneuvered the opposition by putting a young face on the politically divisive immigration problem. Hence the Romney two-step."

How Skilled Immigrants Create Jobs The Employ American Workers Act has achieved three things: Lost ideas. Lost jobs. Lost taxes.By MATTHEW J. SLAUGHTER

President Obama thrust immigration back into the spotlight last week with his executive order halting deportations for certain young illegal immigrants. In the context of America's jobs crisis, however, this is the wrong immigration issue to focus on. Our most pressing immigration problem marched across platforms at American colleges and universities in recent weeks—skilled foreign-born graduates whom we do not adequately incentivize to stay and work here.

At the Tuck School's graduation ceremony this month, I proudly read the names of 277 M.B.A. graduates. The Tuck class of 2012 was 35% foreign-born, representing countries from Australia to Zimbabwe. Many of these graduates chose Tuck over peer schools abroad because they aimed to apply their world-class U.S. education in the U.S. labor market. The same is true across academic fields. Today nearly 42% of all U.S. doctorate-level science and engineering workers are foreign-born.

Won't more immigrant graduates staying in America mean fewer jobs for Americans? No. On the contrary, they will create jobs for Americans—in large corporations and new companies alike. Large companies that hire skilled immigrants tend to hire more U.S. nationals as well. Bill Gates has testified that for every immigrant hire at Microsoft, an average of four non-immigrant employees are hired.

As for start-ups, a 2007 study by researchers at Duke and UC Berkeley found that 25% of all U.S. high-technology firms established between 1995 and 2005 had at least one foreign-born founder. In 2005, these new companies employed 450,000 workers and generated over $50 billion in sales.

Skilled immigrants have long supported U.S. jobs and living standards. They bring human capital, financial capital, and connections to opportunities abroad. Despite all this dynamism, U.S. policy toward skilled immigrants has long been far too restrictive. The H1-B program, which accounts for nearly all of America's legal skilled immigration, imposes a cap of 85,000 visas annually—65,000 with at least a bachelor's degree and 20,000 with at least a master's degree. For years, demand far exceeded the supply. In 2007, the year before the financial crisis struck, more than 150,000 H1-B applications were submitted on the first day.

Since the financial crisis, America's immigration policy has further tightened. Buried in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was the Employ American Workers Act, which restricted H1-B hiring at any U.S. company that received government support from either TARP or new Federal Reserve credit facilities. This act foolishly hurt hundreds of finance companies by limiting their talent pool precisely when they needed new talent the most.

I saw the damage done by this misguided legislation firsthand. Within days of the president signing it into law, a number of U.S. banks reneged on job offers extended months earlier to foreign-born M.B.A. students. Six Tuckies were soon in my office, confused and upset at suddenly facing unemployment. By graduation only one had secured employment in America, after randomly winning a visa lottery. The other five all secured jobs—but all abroad. All five said they would probably never return to the U.S. because of the Employ American Workers Act. The long-term result? Lost ideas. Lost jobs. Lost taxes.

These five graduates exemplify the worrisome reality that America's attractiveness is waning for talented immigrants from dynamic countries. In the past decade, the share of doctoral-degree recipients in science and engineering from China and India who report definite plans to stay in America has been falling. A recent survey by Duke University researcher Vivek Wadwha found that 72% of Indian immigrants who returned to their home country said that opportunities to start their own businesses were "better" or "much better" there than in the U.S. For Chinese immigrant returnees, the figure was an alarming 81%.

We need to reverse this trend if we hope to overcome our jobs crisis, the depth of which is sobering. The 111 million private-sector jobs in America today are the same number there were 12 years ago. Leaders in Washington can keep fiddling with haphazard fiscal incentives or temporary proposals whose political rationale trumps economic ones. Or they can instead rebuild the foundation of new-business formation, innovation and investment that ultimately creates jobs. Opening U.S. doors much wider to skilled immigrants educated here should be a cornerstone of any pro-growth policy. It is a graduation gift that the Class of 2012 and all of America deserve.

Mr. Slaughter is a professor and associate dean at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. From 2005 to 2007 he served on the President's Council of Economic Advisers.

I saw a reference in today's Daily Breeze (a pretty good local paper) that a bill is moving through the CA legislature withdrawing CA from the ICE program wherein CA sends fingerprints of the incarcerated to ICE. unless they have been convicted of "serious felonies". Apparently minor felonies are OK, as is the fact of being here illegally

There's something Haley Barbour reminded me of called the Gate Rule. The former Mississippi governor said it's the first thing you should think of when you think about immigration. People are either lined up at the gate trying to get out of a country, or lined up trying to get in.

It says something about the health of a nation when they're lined up to get in, as they are, still, with America. It says, of course, that compared with a lot of the rest of the world, America's economy isn't in such bad shape. But it says more than that. People don't want to come to a place when they know they'll be treated badly. They don't want to call your home their home unless they know you'll make room for them in more than economic ways.

And so this July 4, a small tribute to American friendliness, openness, and lack of—what to call it? The old hatreds. They dissipate here. In Ireland, Catholics and Protestants could be at each other's throats for centuries, but the minute they moved here, they were in the Kiwanis Club together. The Mideast is a cauldron, but when its residents move here, they wind up on the same PTA committee. It sounds sentimental, but this is part of the magic of America, and the world still knows it even if we, in our arguments, especially about immigration, forget.

So, three stories of American friendliness, openness and lack of the old hatreds.

There was a teenager who came here with his parents and younger brother. They arrived New York and got an apartment on 181st Street and Broadway. He spoke little English but went right into public school. The family needed money, so when he was 16, he transferred to night school and got a day job at a shaving-brush factory. He wore big, heavy rubber gloves and squeezed bleaching acid out of the bristles. Soon he went part time to City College, and then he entered the U.S. Army.

David Gothard .This is a classic immigrant story. It could be about anyone. But the teenager went on to become an American secretary of state, and his name is Henry Kissinger. Here is another part of the story that is classic: how Americans treated him. The workers at the factory were older than he, mostly Italian-American, some second-generation. They wanted to help make him part of things, so they started taking him to baseball games. "It was the summer of 1939. . . . I didn't know anything about baseball," he remembered this week. Now here he was in the roaring stands at Yankee Stadium. About the people in the bleachers, he said, "the most striking thing was the enormous friendliness, the bantering." In Hitler's Germany, "I saw crowds, I'd go to the other side of the street." Here, no sense of looming threat. "That I would say was a very American part of my experience."

He was "enchanted" by the game—"the subtlety, the little nuances—you can watch what the strategy is and how they judge what the opponent is likely to do by the way the fielders position themselves. . . . It is a game that combines leisure with highly dramatic moments!"

And there was the man called Joe DiMaggio. The factory workers would sort of say, "If you take a look at Joe DiMaggio," you will learn something about this country. DiMaggio was "infinitely graceful" as a fielder, "he would sort of lope towards the ball . . . nothing dramatic, he didn't tumble, he didn't strut, and he made it look effortless." He didn't "stand there wagging his bat. . . . He would just stand there with his bat raised. . . . He was all concentration."

Years later they met, and Mr. Kissinger, faced with his boyhood idol, that symbol of those early years, was awed. It was like being a kid and meeting a movie star: "I didn't know exactly what to say to him." They became friends. "He had a fierce kind of integrity."

So Henry Kissinger learned some things about Americans, and America, thanks to a bunch of Italian guys in a brush factory downtown. They were good to him. They were welcoming. Probably when they or their people were new here, someone was good to them.

That is American friendliness. Here is American openness—meaning if you are open to it, it will be open to you. Mary Dorian was an uneducated Irish farm girl with no family to speak of and no prospects She came to America on her own, around 1920. She wrote to the one girl she knew, a distant cousin in Brooklyn, to ask that she meet her at the ship. She landed at Ellis Island, went to the agreed-upon spot, and the cousin wasn't there. She had forgotten. Mary, my grandmother, spent her first night in America alone on a park bench in lower Manhattan.

She went on to find Brooklyn and settle in. She joined an Irish club and a step-dancing club. They didn't have anything like that back home. We make a mistake when we worry that sometimes immigrants come here and burrow more into their old nationality than their new one. It's not a rejection of America, just a way of not being lonely, of still being connected to something. She met her husband in an Irish club, and she got a job hanging up coats in a restaurant. Then she became a bathroom attendant at Abraham & Strauss on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn. When she died in 1960, a lot of black people came to the funeral. This, in a Brooklyn broken up into separate ethnic enclaves, was surprising, but it wouldn't have been to her. They were her coworkers from A&S, all the girls who worked in the ladies room, and their families. They loved her.

When she died, Mary Dorian had a job, a family and friends. She had come here with none of those things. She trusted America, and it came through.

As for the old hatreds:

There was a 7-year-old boy who came over from Germany on the SS Bremen. He was travelling with his younger brother—they too were fleeing the Nazis—and a steward. The Bremen anchored on Manhattan's west side on May 4, 1939, and the children were joined by their father, who was already in New York. They stood on deck watching the bustle of disembarking, and then the boy saw something. "Across the street from where we were, and visible from the boat, was a delicatessen which had its name in neon with Hebrew letters," he remembered this week.

He was startled. Something with Hebrew letters—that was impossible back home. He asked his father, "Is that allowed?"

And his father said, "It is here."

It is here.

The little boy was Mike Nichols, the great film and stage director, who went on to do brilliant things with the freedom he was given here.

Sometimes we think our problems are so big we have to remake ourselves to meet them. But maybe we don't. Maybe we just have to remember who we are—open, friendly, welcoming and free.

Happy Fourth of July to this tender little country, to the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.

"Now, to deal with the Federal failure to secure the river and the drug and human smugglers who use it, Texas Department of Public Safety has deployed gunboats on the river, armed with major firepower. DPS now has 4 shallow-water vessels (soon to increase to 6), each armed with six M-240, 30-caliber automatic machine guns that fire 900 rounds per minute.

Each of the boats, equipped with armor-plating, night vision equipment and a small arsenal of weaponry, costs about $580,000."

That's AZ it seems; spend over 2 million dollars on needless river boats and blame the immigrants for all their problems.

Crime rates in Arizona at lowest point in decades. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the violent crime rate in Arizona was lower in 2006, 2007, and 2008 -- the most recent year from which data are available -- than any year since 1983. The property crime rate in Arizona was lower in 2006, 2007, and 2008 than any year since 1968. In addition, in Arizona, the violent crime rate dropped from 577.9 per 100,000 population in 1998 to 447 per 100,000 population in 2008; the property crime rate dropped from 5,997 to 4,291 during the same period. During the same decade, Arizona's undocumented immigrant population grew rapidly. The Arizona Republic reported: "Between January 2000 and January 2008, Arizona's undocumented population grew 70 percent, according to the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] report. Nationally, it grew 37 percent."

Crime rates have dropped during past decade in other border states. The BJS data further show that violent crime rates and property crime rates in California, New Mexico, and Texas dropped from 1998 through 2008 -- the most recent year from which data are available:

In California, the violent crime rate dropped from 703.7 in 1998 to 503.8 in 2008; the property crime rate dropped from 3,639.1 to 2,940.3 during the same period.In New Mexico, the violent crime rate dropped from 961.4 in 1998 to 649.9 in 2008; the property crime rate dropped from 5,757.7 to 3,909.2 over the same period.In Texas, the violent crime rate dropped from 564.6 in 1998 to 507.9 in 2008; the property crime rate dropped from 4,547 to 3,985.6 over the same period.Cato's Griswold: "t is a smear to blame low-skilled immigrant workers from Latin America for creating a crime problem in Arizona." In an April 27 post, Daniel Griswold, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies, wrote that "Arizona's harsh new law against illegal immigration is being justified in part as a measure to combat crime" and that "drug-related violence along the border is a real problem." But, Griswold continued, "it is a smear to blame low-skilled immigrant workers from Latin America for creating a crime problem in Arizona." From Griswold's post:

The boat is marked Texas Highway Patrol. Don't let the facts get you off message.

Arizona doesn't blame immigrants for their problems. What a bunch of Bullshit to intentional confuse armed robbers with invited guests. Hard to say what the crime problems would be without Eric Holder arming them.

The boat is marked Texas Highway Patrol. Don't let the facts get you off message.

Whoops! Sorry, although my comments and point don't change.

Arizona doesn't blame immigrants for their problems. What a bunch of Bullshit to intentional confuse armed robbers with invited guests. Hard to say what the crime problems would be without Eric Holder arming them.

Actually, AZ and often TX does seem to blame immigrants for their problems. And I don't get your point about the intention to "confuse armed robbers with invited guests". The point is that illegal immigration, although up in AZ and TX, CA and other border states in the period quoted, are not in fact the cause of an increase in violent crimes yet they seem to get blamed for everything.TX would be better off spending the 2 million dollars on it's abominable K-12 educational system (ranking at the bottom) or it's health care (again, TX ranks at the bottom).

Many good points in this, but in my opinion he fails to address the major issue concerning Mexican immigration-- its continued connection to its homeland and the widely felt irredentist emotions of many. The author's failure to distinguish legal and illegal immigration is another major shortcoming.============================

In 1817 the great English economist David Ricardo coined the phrase "comparative advantage" to identify activities that one nation can do better than most others. The concept here is that if the Swiss make the best watches, or the Israelis grow the best oranges, they should make use of their advantages to profit in the marketplace.

Today, America has advantages in the global marketplace that stem from its immigrant population. Lets consider some of these.

Modern nations that have expanding domestic markets are more likely to be economically healthy. For the most part, European nations do not have that advantage, and it hurts them.

When birth and fertility rates are low, over the decades population shrinks, sometimes rapidly in places such as in Italy, Germany, Spain and Greece. In Japan and South Korea, birth and fertility rates are also perilously low. The result: All of their socialized pension plans and programs to provide health care for the aged are dreadfully underfunded. The only serious remedies are higher deficits, reduced benefits or higher taxes—none of them pleasant.

In the U.S., on the other hand, total fertility rates are higher and population continues to grow. While the numbers are down somewhat due to the recession, immigration remains relatively high—an estimated 1.1 million, legal and illegal, in 2010, according to the Census Bureau. This immigration will lead the country on a path of healthy long-term population growth from (roughly) 300 million people in 2000, up to 400 million in 2050 and to half a billion in 2100. This is good news for the growth of the domestic market.

Moreover, America's immigrant population (median age of roughly 29) is younger than that of the native-born (about a decade older). That means they will have many more years of working life, paying into and helping support our old-age pension and health-care systems for years before they take out a dime.

Survey after survey shows that Americans are the most patriotic people on the planet, and that immigrants to the U.S. are among the most patriotic of all Americans. For example, immigrants serve with distinction in our armed forces.

Most immigrants, particularly young ones, assimilate rapidly into the larger American culture. One indicator: intermarriage. There is a lot of it, according to the Census. Latinos and Asians in particular marry outside their race or ethnicity, a pattern characteristic of larger immigrant groups. Their offspring and the offspring of their children lose much of their ancestral identification, even as the grandparents may sob a bit.

The new waves of immigrants since the 1960s, when restrictive legislation was abandoned, have assimilated rapidly and well. The intermarried couples and especially their children become "blended families" and likely call themselves just plain Americans. This follows the traditional pattern throughout American history.

Also traditional is the pattern of how native-born Americans feel about waves of immigration—which is to say, not well. The Irish were "micks" and met signs on stores that had hiring posters in the windows reading "no Irish need apply." The Jews were "kikes" and hotels had signs that read "no Jews and no dogs." The Poles were "Polacks," the Hungarians were "Hunkies," and the Italians were "dagos."

Americans have been afraid of each new group of immigrants as they arrived. As far back as the 18th century, Germans grew almost as numerous as people of English background; there was even some sentiment in favor of German as a second official language. All that didn't stop Benjamin Franklin from writing bitter screeds denouncing them.

Today only the identities of the immigrants have changed. Pat Buchanan, who celebrates hard work, religion and family values, regularly condemns Mexican immigrants who honor hard work, religion and family values.

Mr. Wattenberg, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hudson Institute, is working on "The Death of the Population Explosion: Why Americans Gain and Others Lose," from which this op-ed is drawn.

Glad to hear of the good news for Joe but the war on those who would defend our borders continues.

The American Creed thinks the people should choose the government. Liberal fascism, not liking the opinion of the majority of the American people, seeks to choose a new people for America. This has not changed.

Incubating Ideas in the U.S., Hatching Them ElsewhereBy ALEXANDRA STARR

In 2009, Argentinian entrepreneur Pablo Ambram spent three months at a prestigious business incubator in San Diego, Calif., developing his company, Agent Piggy, which uses technology to teach children about financial management. The Founders' Institute helped Mr. Ambram develop his business and introduced him to promising contacts. Mr. Ambram assembled a board of directors that included a former Oracle executive.

But in the end, Mr. Ambram did not incorporate in the United States. Why? Because he wasn't allowed to stay here. "I met with a few lawyers," he says, "and they said trying to sponsor myself as the CEO of a company would be very expensive, take months, and there was no guarantee it would work."

The most obvious route to residency would have been through a job offer from a U.S.-based company, but Mr. Ambram wanted to start a business. When his six-month visa expired, he left for Chile, where he has raised more than $300,000 and hired four employees. "It was frustrating," he says, "because I wanted and still want to be based in the States. The marketplace there is unparalleled."

The United States—unlike Chile, Britain, Singapore, New Zealand and other countries—does not have a visa category for immigrants who aspire to found companies and create jobs. That means we are turning away potential job creators like Mr. Ambram. The unfortunate state of affairs has drawn attention on Capitol Hill, with lawmakers including Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Rep. Brad Polis (D., Colo.) proposing that immigrants who raise cash from U.S. investors be allowed to remain in the country to launch companies.

But no legislation has been passed. If Congress does move on the matter, lawmakers would be wise to stipulate that visa-granting decisions take into account advice from the existing start-up ecosystem—venture-capitalists and business incubators—rather than giving the task solely to immigration adjudicators, who would be less well-equipped to identify deserving recipients.

The first business incubator popped up in Batavia, N.Y., in 1959, but the most influential programs are less than a decade old. Places like YCombinator in Mountain View, Calif., and TechStars in Bolder, Colo., have nurtured hundreds of tech companies. According to the National Business Incubation Association, there were 1,115 business incubators in the U.S. as of 2006.

The top-flight programs, which are sometimes called accelerators, generally offer office space for three or four months, provide equity capital, and—most important—make introductions to venture capitalists and mentors. Participation can substantially increase a young entrepreneur's odds of success. According to Inc. magazine, of the 126 companies that have gone through the full TechStars program, only 8% have failed, a fraction of the bankruptcy rate for most technology start-ups.

Relatively few of these graduates are foreigners—in part, according to TechStars co-founder David Cohen, because foreign applicants "on the bubble" of gaining acceptance are sometimes turned away because incubators know they have little prospect of being able to remain here. Those who do participate in the programs come on tourist visas, because most incubator programs last just a few months.

Staying in the U.S. can be all but impossible. Mr. Cohen says he has seen graduates who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in the U.S., yet for lack of visas have had to leave and run their businesses remotely from abroad. That limits their productivity and means that jobs that would have gone to American workers were filled elsewhere.

Other countries use incubators to select immigrant entrepreneurial talent. In the U.K., immigrants participating in incubators are granted one- to two-year visas to develop their businesses. The Chilean government has created an incubator in its capital city, called StartUp Chile. It provides work space, visas and $40,000 to entrepreneurs willing to relocate to the city for a minimum of six months. Those who choose to stay longer are allowed to extend their residencies. StartUp Chile lured Mr. Ambram, the Argentinian, to Santiago.

Stars of the tech community have pushed novel solutions to the visa quandary. PayPal founder Peter Thiel is backing a venture to launch a cruise ship 12 miles off the coast of San Francisco that would be populated with foreign entrepreneurs eager to develop business ideas in the U.S. market. Residing offshore would let them circumvent visa issues. Paul Graham, founder of YCombinator, advocates the creation of 10,000 founders visas, with an unspecified group—presumably from the venture capital community—developing the accreditation procedure.

Proposals for entrepreneur visas still don't make use of our elite business incubators as a way to identify worthy applicants. The StartUp Visa bill, introduced by Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry and Indiana Republican Richard Lugar, and StartUp Visa Act 2.0—which has Mr. Rubio and a bipartisan group of senators behind it—require that foreigners raise a minimum of $100,000 for a two-year visa to launch a business. That would leave out many incubator participants because of a chicken-and-egg problem; investors might be wary of writing checks if it's unclear whether the entrepreneur could reach the threshold to remain in the U.S.

Gaining acceptance to the most selective incubators should be weighed in an applicant's favor. The StartUp Visa 2.0 bill provides a blueprint for how we could do this: It proposes that a university graduate with a higher degree in science, technology, engineering or math from a U.S. university who raises a minimum of $20,000 can earn a temporary visa.

If the immigrant's company has created three jobs and raised at least $100,000 within two years, the founder can apply for a green card. Basically, the bill uses the filter of an advanced degree to identify foreigners who show enough promise that they deserve more leeway to start a company here.

Extending a similar opportunity to those who participate in the best incubators would be a low-risk proposition. It would give them a chance to make good on the faith that investors have shown in them. And that would help ensure that fewer Pablo Ambrams get away.

Ms. Starr is the author of a new report on Latino-immigrant entrepreneurship for the Council on Foreign Relations, and an Emerson fellow at the New America Foundation.

Washington's New Twist on Human Sacrifice Another missed chance to hold onto foreign-born scientists and technology experts who were educated in the U.S.By L. GORDON CROVITZ

In the 1990s, just before the handover of Hong Kong to China, there was a going-away lunch for the Canadian consul general. When I entered the venue, I thought it must be the wrong place. The hundreds of ethnic Chinese gathered for the lunch in the colony's largest hotel ballroom didn't look like "Canadians." But before I could complete my turn back out the ballroom door, I realized this was indeed a roomful of Canadians.

After Britain agreed to transfer sovereignty—and Hong Kong's seven million people—to China, many Hong Kong Chinese sought foreign passports, anxious that after the handover in 1997 the Communist regime in Beijing would curtail their freedoms. Canada saw a way to add talented people, offering citizenship to Hong Kong people who qualified through investments or other criteria.

In contrast to Canada, the United States engages in a kind of human sacrifice, refusing to let technologists and scientists stay after they earn advanced degrees from top U.S. universities. Earlier this month, Congress missed its latest chance to open the doors to the best-educated and most-needed workers. Why can't the U.S. be as welcoming as its neighbor to the north?

Political leaders of both parties say they agree with the approach first defined by venture capitalist John Doerr in 2008 as a reform to "staple a green card to the diploma of anybody who graduates with a degree in the physical sciences in the U.S."

In last year's State of the Union address, President Obama said: "As soon as they get their degree, we send them home to invent new products and create new jobs somewhere else. That doesn't make sense." Mitt Romney agrees: "If someone's got a Ph.D., particularly from a U.S. institute of higher learning, or even an accredited foreign institution, staple a green card to it." About half of all graduate students in the hard sciences, and a majority of those completing doctorates, are foreigners.

Here's a sampling of the immigration bills Washington has failed to pass: the Stopping Trained in America Ph.D.s from Leaving the Economy Act; the Advanced Degree Visa Bill; the Startup Act; the Immigration Driving Entrepreneurship in America Act; and the Benefits to Research and American Innovation through Nationality Statutes Act.

The most recent was the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Jobs Act, proposed by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, a Republican. The bill made it to a vote, but under a procedure requiring two-thirds approval. The vote fell short, 257-158, with almost all Republicans in favor as well as 30 Democrats. The bill would have substituted visas for graduates from qualifying universities in the hard sciences for the current program awarding visas in a lottery system that limits the number granted for each country, discriminating against applicants from populous nations such as China and India. "Unfortunately, the Democrats voted today to send the best and brightest foreign graduates back home to work for our global competitors," Rep. Smith said.

There's no debate about the importance of skilled immigrants. Between 1995 and 2005, foreign-born and technically trained entrepreneurs founded half the firms in Silicon Valley.

Graduates in scientific and technical fields can stay in the U.S. for 29 months under a program called Optional Practical Training. Then they can apply for one of 65,000 three- to six-year H-1B visas or one of 20,000 visas for advanced degree holders, including in nontechnical fields. This year the quota for H-1B visas was filled in less than three months.

Even if someone gets one of these visas, he eventually needs to apply for a green card, of which 140,000 are granted each year, fewer than 10% for work-based applicants. The majority are for applicants who have family members in the U.S. These applicants should be admitted under other programs.

In the meantime, countries including Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland, Israel and Singapore have adopted policies in recent years to lure talented emigrants. The governments are hoping to beat the U.S. at its historic comparative advantage in attracting and assimilating people from around the world.

Washington's failure to retain foreigners trained in the U.S. was the last straw for Steve Jobs, who had been an Obama supporter and put together a group of Silicon Valley executives to advise him. "The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can't get done," Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson. "It infuriates me."

Companies are now even willing to pay a new tax for permission to hire skilled workers. At a Brookings Institution event last week, Microsoft proposed more open borders in exchange for employers paying $10,000 per visa and $15,000 per green card. The company estimates this would raise $500 million the federal government could then give to school districts to boost scientific education in the U.S.

In other words, a technology leader like Microsoft is now so desperate that it's willing to bribe—er, contribute to—Washington to get it to do its job of ensuring sensible immigration laws.

With the “papers please” provision of Arizona’s controversial SB 1070 immigration law now in effect, Bill Clinton roused an overflowing crowd at Arizona State University last week with a special shout out to the state’s “dreamers,” the highly organized ranks of undocumented youth seeking permanent residency either through education or the military (and sometimes both). Appearing on behalf of the former Surgeon General Richard Carmona, whose surging campaign to become the first Latino Senator in Arizona now leads in the latest polls, Clinton drew some of his biggest cheers for his support of the DREAM Act merely by calling it the “right thing to do.”

Welcome to the Arizona showdown.

Underscored by Gov. Jan Brewer’s latest act of defiance in denying state benefits to undocumented youth affected by President Obama’s deferral of immigration action against them, the Republican Party’s full embrace of Arizona’s immigration policy at its summer convention drew a clear line in the state’s sand. The “Arizonification” of America continues to frame the national immigration debate. It has cemented the state’s frontline image as so hopelessly wedded to a punitive approach of “attrition through enforcement” at any cost that the “Daily Show” once referred to Arizona as the “meth lab of democracy.”

Not that the headline-grabbing nativists, frontier justice sheriffs, neo-Nazi marchers, gun-toting militiamen and Tea Party political figures don’t exist in Arizona. But as the estimated 5,500 in attendance for Carmona and Clinton reminded the state, the fringe elements dominating the media and Arizona’s state house may have finally met their match. Case in point: An electrified citizens’ campaign has mounted the most serious get-out-the-vote effort against Joe Arpaio, the notorious Maricopa County Sheriff, in his 20-year reign.

The resurgence of this “other Arizona” signals a revival of the state’s century-old legacy of fighting against such anti-immigrant and thinly veiled racism, a movement that beganmalmost as soon as Arizona’s entry as a territory in the mid-19th century. For example, in Tucson, the pioneering Mexican immigrant Estevan Ochoa not only salvaged public education but single-handedly faced down the Confederate occupation of the Old Pueblo. When the Tucson Unified School District dismantled its acclaimed Mexican-American Studies program in Ochoa’s hometown last spring, Latino youth were quick to rekindle his memory.

I believe that today’s overlooked but growing alliance among Latinos, retiring baby boomers and rooted centrists will have a far a more lasting impact on both the liberal and conservative agendas nationally than the headline-grabbing but faltering Tea Party. This alliance might even have an impact on the 2012 election: Beyond Carmona’s surprising gains, the latest polling data to include Spanish-speaking voters now places the presidential showdown in a dead heat, even as Gov. Mitt Romney hangs on to a healthy overall lead in Arizona.

Is the other Arizona coming back?

Consider the progressive stalwarts who wrote one of the most enlightened constitutions in the country at Arizona’s birth in 1912. In a prophetic speech that he gave after negotiating a nationally watched labor agreement between striking union miners and copper companies, Gov. George W. Hunt spelled out the challenge facing the entire nation:

It will be a happy day for the nation when the corporations shall be excluded from political activity and vast accumulations of capital cannot be employed in an attempt to control government.

Railing against corporate influence and money in politics in Arizona in 1916, Hunt foretold the Occupy Wall Street movement a century in advance:

“The working class, plus the professional class, represent 99 percent,” he declared. “The remaining 1 percent is represented by those who make a business of employing capital.”

For all of his enlightenment, Hunt and his progressive forces succumbed to anti-immigrant pressures from more conservative unions and excluded the very foot soldiers who had built his labor ranks before statehood: in 1903, Mexican-American, native and immigrant workers led the first strikes in the state in Morenci.

The betrayal came full circle in 1917. Driven by a similar anti-immigrant hysteria during World War I, armed copper company thugs led by a border sheriff rounded up and deported striking immigrant miners in the copper capital of Bisbee. The extreme measure drew national condemnation, but also set a precedent of using punitive measures against immigrants over the next century whenever the economy slumped, wars ended or election time heated up.

But Arizonans also fought back. In 1972, the national media once again focused here, when Gov. Jack Williams signed a bill that banned secondary boycotts and strikes during harvest time, cracked down on collective bargaining rights and union membership procedures, and made it a crime to make “misleading” speeches about boycotted products. The headlines screamed: “Arizona-type legislation is spreading to many other farm states, despite protests.”

Launching his “Si Se Puede” movement, the inspiring slogan that would be adopted as “Yes, We Can” by President Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, Cesar Chavez, an Arizona native and co-founder of the United Farm Workers embarked in 1972 on a “fast for love” in Phoenix in the “spirit of social justice in Arizona.” Chavez wrote:

The fast is to try to reach the hearts of those men, so that they will understand that we too have rights and we’re not here to destroy, because we’re not destroyers, we’re builders.

Larry Downing/Reuters President Barack Obama at the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument on Oct. 8, 2012, in Keene, Calif.

Although Williams’s hard-line anti-union legislation would be fought in the courts for years, the Chavez-led campaign signed up 150,000 new voters, ushering in a new era of electoral participation: Within two years, thanks to Chavez’s work, Raul Castro became the state’s first (and still the only) Latino governor.

In one of the most overlooked major news stories last year, a similar “Si Se Puede” movement once again shocked local and national media observers and entrenched political interests lulled into believing Arizona’s SB 1070 had placed the state on electoral lockdown. Led by Randy Parraz, a labor organizer, new bipartisan movement fed up with the state’s extremist policies took its organizational momentum into electoral politics and carried out the historic recall of former state senator Russell Pearce, the self-declared “Tea Party President” and legislative mastermind behind SB 1070. The historic nature of the recall, dating back to the state’s progressive constitution battle a century ago, was the opening salvo in the 2012 elections, for two reasons.

First, Parraz and his Citizens for a Better Arizona brought together often disparate factions in Arizona —including rising Latino youth, retiring baby boomers, centrists that included the Mormon church, and the demoralized local Democratic Party — in arguably one of the most conservative legislative districts in the nation. “Arizona has been in the headlines for all of the wrong reasons,” Parraz told his forces. “We need a victory now.” And they got it. Pearce, considered one of the most influential voices in the “attrition through enforcement” movement spreading across numerous states, was the first state senate president to be recalled in American history, according to election record keepers.

Speaking about the Pearce recall, Dan O’Neal, chairman of the Arizona Progressive Democrats of America, said: “This election sends a message to other Democratic efforts,” to not be afraid to take on issues and races in red states.”

Secondly, the recall also spotlighted the emergence of a new Latino generation and its role in a historic demographic shift taking place in Arizona and across the nation. With the nation’s highest “cultural generation” gap, according to a Brookings Metropolitan Policy study in 2010 — 83 percent of the state’s aging population was categorized as Anglo, and 57 percent of the children came from Latino families in the last census — Arizona has changed from 72 percent to 50 percent non-Latino in the past two decades. The demographics don’t pull any punches. A new political conversation is about to take place in Arizona. And organizers are not sitting back and waiting.

Working with several other civil rights groups, Parraz and his Citizens for a Better Arizona now lead the “Joe’s Got to Go” campaign against Arpaio, whose one-time insurmountable lead over his opponent Paul Penzone has shrunk to a few percentage points. With the sheriff under investigation for racial profiling by the Department of Justice, the take-no-prisoners challenge of Arpaio’s role as the face of SB 1070 enforcement has already electrified the state’s once timid liberal ranks.

If an Arpaio upset happens, with the state “papers please” law a part of all races in the state and the nation, the rise of the “other Arizona” and its bipartisan rejection of extremism could reverse the “Arizonification of America” push back in the opposite direction. As one of fifteen swing states where the margin of victory often hangs on one to three percentage points, the expected 6-8 percent increase in Latino voters places Arizona on the cusp of electing Carmona to a highly prized Senate position for the Democrats.

In essence: While Arizona may not swing to President Obama, the defeat of Arpaio or a victory for Carmona would be a huge step toward dismantling Republican control behind Arizona’s state immigration policy, and changing a state of mind for the media and outside observers.

No more “meth lab of democracy.”

Inspired by organizers like Parraz, and driven by the changing demographics, electoral change is coming in increments to Arizona in 2012 — and ultimately laying the groundwork for the gubernatorial race in 2014 for either Brewer or a bevy of Republican candidates. A groundwork deeply rooted in the other Arizona’s powerful lessons of history that transcend the state’s borders.

As Phoenix-based Puente human rights advocate Carlos Garcia recently told me, Arizona’s gift to the nation may simply be this legacy of resiliency against extremism on the front lines. “Turning the tide from hate to human rights,” as Garcia put it, sends a powerful message that will reach far beyond the ballot box.

Jeff Biggers is the author, most recently, of “State Out of the Union: Arizona and the Final Showdown Over the American Dream.”

the highly organized ranks of undocumented youth seeking permanent residency either through education or the military (and sometimes both).

You can't join the US military if you are an illegal alien. My wife was ready to join the Army Nat'l Guard, and despite having a Permanent Resident Card (Which she must carry with her at all times, a federal law) had a SSN card that was issued before she had her "green card" and couldn't enlist because of that. It said "not for employment purposes".

To become an Enlisted Soldier in the U.S. Army, you must be:A U.S. citizen or permanent resident alien 17-35 years old Healthy and in good physical condition In good moral standing Have a High School Diploma or equivalent Some Army jobs may have additional qualifications.